The Thompson School District joined other northern school districts participating in the Thriving School Program to share successes it has made in improving staff wellness.
Thriving Schools, operated by the Colorado Education Initiative and funded by Kaiser Permanente, provides grants to participating school districts to improve staff well-being, with the hope that healthier staff will do better work and remain at their schools longer, which therefore improves student outcomes.
“The idea is supporting adults so that adults feel connected, adults feel well and have skills to regulate, and then that trickles down to students,” said Marcus Bratton, senior director for implementation and partnership at CEI, at the Thriving Schools Impact Showcase: North Region held at the Forge in Loveland. “We know that kids are going to school in a place where adults have those skills, and where school districts are stepping up to support the adults in the building, then kids are having a better experience at school.”
The theory appears to be working, according to presentations from each school district, which found encouraging signs like declines in chronic absenteeism.
Districts are given wide leeway in their approaches to the problem, so long as they are aimed at addressing four outcomes: increased job satisfaction and reduced stress for adults, increased social emotional learning, increased mental health supports and stronger student relationships.
The Thompson School District, one of the original four school districts to participate in the program nine years ago, has focused on emotional regulation for its staff, including designated spaces where staff and students can go to reset themselves, full-time counselors at every elementary school in the district, and book studies for teachers where they go over literature and research on staff well-being.
TSD Director of Student Success Jennifer Guthals pointed to “Educator Wellness,” a book that she said was helpful for staff looking to develop healthy ways of engaging with their profession, as an example.
“This is a gamechanger, a really incredible book that gives staff the tools to address these things, instead of ‘Oh, you should just join a gym,’” Guthals said. “This has been really important for us and we’re going to continue our work on that.”
Copies have been distributed throughout the district and book studies have drilled deeper into the context, with grant funds providing compensation for teachers who engage with those sessions outside of their regular duties.
The Thriving Schools program began with four school districts, and has grown to ten since it was implemented nine years ago. Thompson and Boulder Valley were among the original four, and two more northern school districts, District 6 in Greeley and 27J Schools in Brighton have since joined.
Those northern districts were given the opportunity to hear presentations from staff at each one Friday, allowing staff to see what their neighbors were doing with the same grants and consider ways to incorporate those ideas into their own work.
The grant is sunsetting, according to Bratton, but one aim of the program was to implement sustainable practices that could continue once the funds had been spent.
Guthals pointed to the book studies as an example of something that could continue after the grant funded the purchase of the books themselves, and noted that TSD was matching funds from the grant to finance its programs, so many could continue now that the initial startup costs had been covered.
“I’m in conversations with our human resources department on how we can continue some of this,” she said. “We’ve been able to send some people to training on this, so continuing to look for funding to train staff in these approaches to educator wellness so we can perpetuate that past the grant.”
